Greedy Goblin

Friday, February 17, 2012

Long term planning

While playing EVE I try to figure out why people consider it "hard". Not because of the gameplay, I mean executing the actions isn't harder than WoW, or can even be easier, just think of the reaction time and spatial awareness demands of rated BGs and hard mode raids.

EVE is hard for the average, social guy because it requires meta-skills that are trivial to me, but for them it's just as hard as reading something on a language they barely know.

The first such difficulty is setting a goal. In WoW, you are in rails from lvl 1 to HM Deathwing. The next step is maybe not easy to do, but you always know what is it.

The second difficulty is facing your mistakes instead of just ignore them as "bad luck lol" and keep on being stupid. In WoW you can level up as a spirit geared warrior, just slower than proper players. In EVE if you insist of going to mine in low sec with a Bantam, you will surely run out of money.

The third was found yesterday while planning. For me it's quite obvious to make plans. For many people it's not. They just jump into whatever they consider fun in that moment and see how it goes. That attitude is OK in WoW. Not perfect of course, you are much better off doing Therazane quests while leveling, and not when your application is rejected by a HM guild based on your missing shoulder enchant. But that's not something you can't fix fast. Whatever activity you get into will provide you some form of character advancement and while planning can increase its speed, it's not game-breaking if you just fool around.

In EVE you are in competition with other players and to beat them you must have proper skills. I'm not talking about WASD skills, but the skills of your character. Instead of leveling up, you advance in various skills like "frigate ship commanding" or "criminal connections". You gain skill points automatically. Each skill has a point requirement and you generate points as time passes based on your attributes. No grindable activity speeds up skill point gains (besides grinding for better implants). It means that certain skills can only be acquired after months.

For example to fly a Bustard, the next step of the freighter ships, I'd have to wait 28 days. Of course if I'd start training those skills, I would be limited to my current 1-1.5M/hour hauling activity, which isn't bad for a newbie (running level 2-3 missions is about 0.3-0.5M/hour and high security hauling is semi-AFK). So after 29 days I'd be ready to fly the Bustard but wouldn't have the necessary money. I mean I may had 135M in a month, but flying a ship that costs more than 20% of your money is a capital case idiocy in EVE.

So here is what I will do: in a few days I finish training my "must have to run" skills, like accounting, broker relations, connections. Then I'll do a neural remamp. It's a change of attributes and can be done once a year except for the first 2 times which are free to let a new player fix his mistakes. Well, I'm intending to use these once in a lifetime bonuses for increased efficiency. I'll remap for maximum Memory and Intelligence, setting all other attributes to minimum. I train my industrial skills that I plan to use to make 2-3x more money without new equipment.

While I make the money, I train some mechanical skills that increase ship survival, they are Memory-Intelligence skills too, would be stupid to not use those attributes. Then I use my second free remap to max out Perception-Willpower and train the spaceship driving skills. Not only the ones needed to the Bustard, but also to the Crane, Charon and Basilisk, despite I'll be unable to fly these ships for months. Then I do my last remap and set my final attribute setup which will most likely be Charisma and Memory 21, rest 19.

Maybe I'm weird but I actually found figuring these out one of the most fun activities of the game. As a bonus I transported some more stuff to Jita while doing so. However someone who just do things as he pleases can be very easily devastated in EVE. Imagine Arthasdklol, who ran lot of missions (daily quests) to finally have 100 million and buy a Cerberus as he heard from friends that he can finally pwn with that. And after he got it, he sees this:

PS: To those who think that only ganking is the real EVE game, let me show that you can make "feed on tears" mail in the high sec, without firing a single blaster:

33 comments:

So...you send a gloating email to someone who enabled your style of play? Unless I am mistaken you are making your money by transporting, so why warn this guy? It profits you for people to do that.

You made 18 million off him, he made 40 off you and went back to mining Scordite in that system. You just acted as his distributor.

Also I don't think people consider EVE "hard" because it requires planning (well sure some are turned off by the long-term appeal, but that's not ALL of them)...people consider it "hard" because in EVE there are enough "inconveniences" (See Rohan's post) that it can take a while to get set up to have fun.

Even going out ganking requires fitting a ship (assuming you haven't done it), figuring out a good low-sec system or high-sec with AFK miners, then finding said individuals and killing them or luring them into getting marked. These ganks last a few minutes at best, after a half hour of work. Make no mistake, those minutes are quite a rush! But to some it's more worth it to go play something like WoW where a 10 minute dungeon queue nets you 15-20 minutes of fun in the instance, or a 5-10 minute PvP queue sticks you right into the action.

Was there a point to that email? I would imagine the better play would have been to send nothing, and continue exploiting the situation for as long as that player continued underpricing his goods. As for this bit:

Maybe I'm weird but I actually found figuring these out one of the most fun activities of the game.

No, you're not weird for finding that fun. Back when I played D&D, I would spend 8-10 hours pouring over character abilities and spells attempting to finesse the optimum power out of the rules, for every 1-2 hour game session. Similarly, I had a lot of fun in WoW mapping out the most efficient route in gearing up for raiding (Shadowfang Keep contained 4 upgrades/sidegrades that allowed me to skip another heroic I didn't like, etc).

The rub is that having fun planning A) can happen in any game, B) becomes considerably less fun once you figure it out, and C) there's probably an EJ for EVE that done all the work already. So you've discovered the most efficient way to level skills in EVE... are you going to pay $15/month to semi-AFK your way past 2-3 months of skill grinding?

In other words, efficiency and planning is dumb unless you also enjoy the background game. Otherwise there are plenty of F2P games wherein you could do the exact same thing.

@Clokwork: I can make profit over intelligent miners too. It makes sense that prices are lower on the edge of the region than on Jita. He did not sell 10% low, he sold 35% low.

@Andru: the existence of buy order makes EVE different than WoW. If you overprice your glyph, it may not sell. However there was a bid order for this item, so he could SURELY and INSTANTLY sell it.

@Anti: I'm not "insisting" on haul trading, I just don't have the option to station trade. I neither has the capital, nor the skills (I mean the ones in the trade section). So even if I know that item X would sell for 15M in a week, I have to accept a 12M buy order now as I can't have 12M standing illiquid for a week. Hauling needs nothing else than a ship and semi-AFK time.

How long did it take you to haul those 360.000 m3? Even with an Iteron V with max cargo you could only haul around 40.000 per run, and probably you had to dead cargo runs on the way back, so time=money lost right there.

You could probably have refined that (or find someone with appropriate skills to do it for you) for quite a profit, and then hauling the refined minerals, which take up way less space.Of course, with correct standing and skills, you could've made 3 million more profit than hauling it in the first place.

You also exposed a potential trade route of yours, not that good an idea.

Assuming the guy is a simple miner, he wouldn't have the capacity to haul that stuff that easily, so this might be more effective:

Sending him an email offering him to contract his ores to another place could be beneficial for both, say by offering him 40 per, still giving you a nice 10 to 12 ISK/per over the median selling price. (Depends on the region you are in of course). You could also cut some costs by direct contracting, offering more potential profit.

Although this is a bit of potential carebaering you'd be doing, if he has some carebaer friends they might hire you for service for the entire corp. You'd be sitting in big haulers in no time then, assuming that a miner can do around 1600m^3/minute with efficient mining, and 5 of them mining, you'd have a huge profit just on the spot. If you tell them to specialize in Ores you can efficiently refine, there's even more money to be made, because transporting refined goods is so much easier.

Managing your supply chains in EVE is not very simple, and takes planning to be competitive. So by stepping in for someone and taking over part of their chain you can gain cash easily while waiting for your skills until you can expand your own supply chains, which will bring you to the point of getting your own contracts with other people to cut your costs.

Of course, there could always be a scammer around the corner, so take care, especially with player contracts.(Collateral Scams are just one to be aware of).

i then progressed to running lvl 3s in a hurricane then lvl 4s in a maelstrom.

i'm guessing by your low valuation of lvl 2 and 3 mission rewards you are probably talking about courrier missions. security missions a MUCH more rewarding. the lvl 4 hauling missions can be good but only if you have the combat skills to do the story line missions.

Right now you are the guy in the bottom two panels. Going 'hurrdee hurr hurr I just made 18m ISK in an of hauling because that seller must be soooo stoooopid. *gloat gloat*'

EVE is a complex game, there are a dozen reasons why someone might find it more profitable, or expedient to dump a bunch of minerals below price. Maybe he just popped into that system out of a convenient WH that opened from his corner of nullsec. Maybe he's wardecced, and considers it unsafe to haul that shit all the way to Jita. Maybe he doesn't consider 18m worth his time. Hell, I made more than that from my passive PI alts, just while typing this post.

Instead of assuming that everyone is a moron, simply because you don't understand their motivations in the game, educate yourself about EVE and in a few months maybe you'll have more insight into why someone would choose to sell ore in an out of the way system below price.

Read the EVE Uni wiki. Get EVEMon. Get EFT or Pyfa. Figure out how to use them without anyone holding your hand. And above all, actually play the game.

Or forget carebearing, and come join us in wspace - the last bastion of gang PvP in EVE. :)

it's not that uncommon in eve to sell to a conveniant price and have someone else do the hauling (and profit from it) logistics is a role that quite a few people make their living of.. so your mail is not really making too much sense

Opportunity Cost is the buzzword for trading. When you consider that you are making peanuts now, and a few tens of millions here or there is nothing comparatively.

I buy and sell regionwide without leaving the station I am parked at, and yes, I dump things on the market at cheap prices when they are 20 jumps away from me.

I know what I bought it for, and I know what margin is worth me not having to fly up there and collect it, so I will happily sell it to someone else who wants to transport it 20 or so jumps to a trade hub.

I generally do regionwide buy orders (cos then you get stuff really cheap), and then, unless I am really bored, sell them at a decent markup on the station where I picked them up, often to the same people who sold them to me.

Remember as well, your profit margins are a lot tighter than someone who has standings, both faction and corporation, and the relevant skills trained to reduce taxes.

The estimated skill training is generous. You can run those missions earlier, but probably for less isk/hour. Those time estimates also leave some room for non-ship related skills.

Running security missions requires active gameplay, so if you prefer semi-afk activities you might be ok with less profit than that. But anything substantially lower than those marks is considered really bad isk/hour if making money is your goal.

Others have said this but you email isn’t gloating in the least bit. It looks like you still have to grasp the full production chain.

Ore is useless. Well it’s not entirely useless. It’s only purpose (outside of needed item for a few missions) is to be refined into minerals which are used for the construction of everything. That solid pyroxeres is 0.35m3 per unit. Every mineral occupies 0.01m3 of cargo space. The prices I’ll use were back from when I was still playing so they’re undoubted off.

Pyroxeres refines into Tritanium (3.31ea), Pyerite (4.17ea), Mexallon (29.45ea), and Nocxium (422.03ea). If I lost no minerals to wastage from refining I end up with 886 Tritanium (2,932.66isk), 62 Pyerite (258.54isk), 126 Mexallon (3,710.7isk), and 12 Nocxium (5,064.36isk) minus what is taxed by the station (0-5%). So that totals up to 11,966.26isk that occupies 10.86m3 of storage space. 333 Pyroxeres sold for 17,012.97 and occupies 99.9m3 of space. I’m thinking my mineral prices are probably way under current market prices. Regardless you’re getting about 170.3isk for each m3 of cargo space you use transporting Solid Pyroxeres. Refining the minerals and transporting them has a value of 1101.86isk for each m3 of cargo space used. It’s also worth noting that an average Iteron V would take 8 trips to push all that ore but refining it down would require 1 trip.

Time = Money

Considering the quantity of ore he had, he is a miner and probably a Hulker so he’s doing 1500-1700m3 per minute of ore harvesting. Moving that ore from the station that he drops off at to any other station is a loss of profit for him because the time he would spent hauling ore is no where near as profitable to him as it is to mine. The only way for a miner to begin to make hauling profitable is to have an alt that is a hauler that cannot also mine or to be able to refine with no waste.

If you’re going to be buying ore to resell you may also want to check out refining, especially if you’re buying ore that you will be transporting long distances in quantities that will require multiple trips. Even with a fully skilled Charon that has 987k cargo space (IIRC) you can only fit 3,290,000 units of Pyroxeres.

The ultimate failure on your part without realizing it is that paradoxically in EVE burning that bridge to the CAREBEAR who sold the ore is completely stupid. Not only could you have continued to make isk from future sales but unlike wow in EVE you aren't anomymous, that mail will spread costing you isk from others. In EVE no one forgets.

The most profitable ventures in EVE aren't initiated through getting skills or bigger ships --- they are initiated by leveraging the skills and ships of those around you. By contacting that guy and offering to be his agent you could have done much better. So how many days in and how many bridges burned? Those bridges are your long term future, invest in them.

@Dsj: she wasn't a prospecting long term customer. She was a random idiot who mistyped her numbers. Unless they find the cure for idiocy, I'll find a dozen like that every day (maybe not with 1.2M cargo, but enough to fill my hold)

The letter you sent is the most ungoblinish thing I have ever seen you do. You did it for pure gloating satisfaction, to make yourself feel good and him feel bad. This is a very social move. Especially since, if you are right in your analysis, he may take note and remove your arbitrage opportunity for the future. However, I suspect the other posters are correct, and the seller is actually acting in his own best interest, calculating, for whatever reason, that hauling is not worth it to him.

Also, I concur with the opinion that the new captcha is horrible. I had to try like 5 times.

Gevlon, I'm pretty sure you misunderstood something here. If that transport took more than around 60 minutes in total, even a decent alt would make more money by staying with mining instead of hauling. So it was probably the correct choice for the miner. Since mining is semi afk as well and timeable with a kitchen timer (can every 6 mins flat), he was probably more efficient this way. And 5 jumps there and back take their time, even in the big ships.

Given the number of macro miners in eve i would be surprised if that mail ever get read? also do not set up sell orders in Jita unless you want to spend the rest of you life doing the 0.1 isk game. often better to buy in Jita and then find a 0.0 entry point nearest to the biggest war zone and set up a market there. Can make some nice isk doing this.

Well, I just cannot accept fact that Gelvon says something like "The first such difficulty is setting a goal. In WoW, you are in rails from lvl 1 to HM Deathwing. The next step is maybe not easy to do, but you always know what is it."I mean that such casual player can only see one way to defeat HM Deathwing - wait for 30% debuff. It isn't actually a way - it is a sucking until content comes available. It will, eventually, but that isn't a goal. Not at all.

Yes you can be a trader (good old buy low and sell high), but you can also be a space trucker. Never under estimate how much people are willing to pay to move goods around in EVE. The logistics of hauling affects EVERY aspect of EVE. It is a chore for most people, and for those not good with planning and handling lots of details, an abhorrent task.

Take for instance a player that lives out in nullsec and spends 90% of his time engaged in PvP or looking for PvP. They don't want to deal with hauling their replacement ships and supplies through various choke points and enemy space. I know I made a lot of isk back in the day handling all of that for people. It wasn't even my primary business, just extra use of my infrastructure and supply lines.

In empire, the space trucker opportunities also exist. Especially since when looking at the market people are lazy. If faced with buying it in system for a major markup, or spend 15 mins flying 4 jumps to get it and bring it back, almost always they will pay the markup.

Other hauling opportunities also exist in the Contract system in-game. People setup a contract to have goods moved from one system to another and they specify a collateral and delivery time. Just make sure you carefully look at the volume of the contract as well as what the destination system is!

Most of the contracts I found just didn't pay enough to be worth the time (people are cheap bastards), but there are some good ones on there. Always be on the lookout to make business contacts though! If someone needs something hauled once, they probably have a future need and they may pay will for a reliable and trust worthy transporter.

Also, one site I found quite useful was http://eve-central.com/ for market research. Since in-game you can only access the market for the region you are in it can be hard to spot opportunities or do price checking. The site has data from all regions (supplied by users), so if you find it useful download their client and submit your market data.

Personally, while I had a blast doing PvP in EVE, especially out in nullsec when you are fighting to either defend your own space or take someone else's away. By far, I was the most engaged when I had gotten into the manufacturing aspect of things. It was out in nullsec with a new Alliance, so imagine opening up a factory out in the Wild West in the USA during the mid 1800's. There is no existing infrastructure to support you, so you have to make or haul every single thing out there, through hostile territory. An untold number of hours went into planning, market analysis, supply & inventory management, factory management, transport logistics, order management, and building business relationships with local miners. I made my first billion isk doing that, and loved almost every minute of it.

Looks like you missed my original comment. Basically, about remaps, you need to get EVEMon application - it helps you plan all the skills, insta calculates the most optimal remap and implants, tells you exactly how long it will take with various profiles, etc. Don't remap blindly (like I did)

Speaking of making money, does some of you hisec bears know if there's good money to be made running advanced tier PI processing in hisec? I would assume extraction is pathetic - I looked at raw materials scans in hisec compared to my planets in null, and... :smug:. Still if there's money to be made, you can also do that - if you don;t find it too boring.

Gevlon you have a LONG way to go before you "figure" out how Eve works. Your email is clearly a demonstration of that.

Since you desired to make "tears", your email is a fail at that. Go blow up someone who is doing what you are doing and that will generate tears.

Here are two things you need to quickly get your head wrapped around Eve:1) You are not ship in Eve (unlike other MMO's where gear matters). In Eve a 2 week new character can successfully fly a tackle ship and be a productive part of LARGE scale battles or small gang fights. Its not the ship that matters.2) There is NO end game in Eve (some might argue that there is no end game in any MMO, but in reality in a game like WoW it is raiding). That end game does not exist. That is the beauty of Eve. Some people spend years in Wormhole space or Null Sec and never set foot in Jita. For some people the killboard is the master of their "fun". To others its not.3) In relation to #1, you are not even your clone. Barring implants and having an up-to-date clone, death does not matter in Eve.

So it is interesting to read your posts because of your approach to the game. If your are trying to emulate you success from WoW to Eve and prove that the majority of people are M&S, its probably not going to happen.

Why? Because the majority of M&S leave Eve very quickly because there is no one there to hold their hand and show them what they must do. If you think the person you bought that ore from is an M&S I think you are poorly mistaken as others have pointed out.

Yes, there is a saying in EVE: when an idiot leaves EVE to go play WoW, the average IQ of both games’ player bases increases. EVE does a very good job of filtering out your standard Arthasdklol that you may be used to, from the very start, I read once that EVEs initial vertical learning curve was designed like that on purpose. http://www.flickr.com/photos/23579228@N04/2335016192/

That is not to say there aren’t Arthasdklols. Oh, they are, but just of a different caliber. Undocking with plexes, hauling tens of billions of cargo in t1 frigates and industrials, pimping mission ships with billions in officer mods, flying absolute idiot fits, ratting in supercaps, the list goes on. Here’s the thing though – and a dude named Malcanis put it best in some forum post: in any other game, bad players are just annoyances you can do nothing about, in EVE, they are a constant source of profit (and tears). Nobody is camping a mailbox in a faction fit Machariel in EVE (for more than 5 minutes) that’s for sure.

You are learning, young padawan. Eve is a completely amoral game, and if you stay here long enough you will become one of us.

Piracy as a profession is traditionally fairly low income, especially compared to things like incursions and exploration. Suicide ganking in highsec can be profitable, but really good drops are pretty rare.

And ganking isn't always done for profit. I've ganked exhumers with battleships just for lols, spending money and making none in exchange. For older players gank ships (especially destroyers and tier 3 battlecruisers) are trivial to afford, and can be thrown away all day.

Meh, no one in EVE dealing in large volume of goods is a noob, because they would have lost all their money long ago already. The miner figured in the time it would take him to haul all that ore to the more profitable market, using a ship he may not even have or be able to fly, he could simply continue mining where he is and make as much or more money.

In EVE logistics has a very real cost. You can't just mail things to yourself. Distance matters. Volume matters. Time matters. People will pay extra for the convenience of buying instantly and locally. They will also take a discount to sell locally.

I spent my early days raising money using an industrial to haul and price arbitrage between regions. Unless you can do it in volume, using a billion ISK transport ship, you can spend less time doing other things and make more money. But even I didn't haul ore, which is extremely bulky. I would have thought a goblin would have this worked out in seconds.

As others have said, you greatly underestimate EvE's vast and terrifying metagame. I doubt anyone selling that much pyroxeres actually mined it, they probably bought it from the miners and then sold it to you because they didn't want to actually haul it anywhere. 18M is pretty chump change in the big scheme of things - you can make ten times that much in an hour doing a variety of activities if you have access and know what you're doing.

Hell, just by posting this you're making yourself a potential target for piracy because you fairly new and hauling shiny things and everyone knows your in-game name now.